The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster Systems Modeling Opposition Agenda Setting in the House of Commons, 1832{1915∗ Andrew C. Eggersy Arthur Spirlingz Abstract We consider the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of West- minster polities: that the shadow cabinet is a `government-in-waiting'. We compare the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a `procedural' theory wherein the shadow cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working class voting, and a `competition' theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for shadow cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, we provide a novel method for identifying shadow cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. We argue that the `competition' hypothesis is the most plausible version of events and that the opposition responded to the new `party orientated electorate' by strategically re-organizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet's structure. ∗First version: January 2014. This version: September 17, 2015. Audiences at the American Political Science Association, Midwest Political Science Association, the Princeton Political Methodology seminar, New York University and Nuffield College, Oxford provided helpful feedback. Comments from Karen Jusko and JF Godbout are greatly appreciated. yAssociate Professor, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
[email protected] zAssociate Professor, Department of Politics and Center for Data Science, New York University.
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction Informal institutions are \socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, commu- nicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels" (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004, 727; see also Lauth, 2000).